The @FCShirtsUnited Twitter account got an interesting new follower today. After a quick skim of the new follower’s recent tweets, I actually (embarrassingly) thought it was real. Later I got another new follower, who also looked real at first glance. But then I happened to notice one of their tweets that sounded oddly familiar, so I brought up the other new follower’s page. . . Sure enough. Spammers.

It’s a new (to me, at least) spammer scam. It’s more subtle than what I’ve usually seen, which is usually just an account with a crazy name that follows or mentions one of the accounts I run, possibly with a short phrase or a few random words, and then a link. Those are obviously spam, and I admit to a certain satisfaction in marking them as such in my Twitter app.

But this new style is more subtle, and seems aimed at a longer play. Before starting whatever spammy activity is surely planned, these accounts are being established more carefully. A single one of these accounts could almost be confused with a real (if annoying, repetitive, and kind of dumb) person. But two together clearly shows the pattern, including the intentional attempt to make them seem random, different, and more believable.

1 Comment

Jon Crane

I fell for this scam, a ‘girl’ called Calandra Sounders started following me and I thought little of it. But then I noticed her tweets were a) phenomenally dull and b) slightly repetitive. At first i thought she might be a bit ‘special’. But I’ve now found a whole swarm of people on Twitter sending out identical tweets as each other, most of them purporting to be quite attractive young women. But is it Spam? I really need to know.

You’ve called it a subtle type of spamming but I reckon it’s not that subtle. Who uses the word ‘imbibed’ more than once in their lives? And then my girl Calandra would hashtag #loveit and if you click on that it brings up dozens of other false accounts, so it’s quite easy to work out it’s all fake. Perhaps it’s a social experiment to see how tolerant men can be on Twitter with seemingly attractive women even when they have nothing to say?